NCAR makes international data accessible for atmospheric research

Quick access to timely, usable atmospheric data is critical to the Earth system science community’s ability to make progress in their work. Reanalyses from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) are updated monthly or more frequently in some cases, adding to the urgency.

To support use of the data in climate diagnostics, model development and validation, intercomparison projects and other endeavors, the NCAR Research Data Archive (RDA team of CISL data engineers and curators downloads, processes, archives, and makes it available to the community. Demand is such that some 3,600 users worldwide have downloaded 2.7 petabytes of data via web access alone in the past 15 months. Cheyenne and Casper users have quicker direct-read access to 2.0 petabytes of data from the GLADE system.

The Research Data Archive "Find Data" web page

The "Find Data" tab on the Research Data Archive home page provides a complete list of all reanalysis data sets that are available through the RDA.

Before making the data available, the RDA team processes the data sets for quality control, regridding to standardized grids, restructuring it into single-parameter times series and, in the case of ECMWF data, converting the GRIB format to CF-conforming compressed netCDF4-HDF5 files. The team also provides extensive logistical support and scientific consulting via several platforms, including the Research Data Archive Help Desk.

RDA encourages Cheyenne and Casper users to explore this archive via the links below or on GLADE. These data sets in particular are good entry points to begin your investigations:

Contact the RDA team for more information or if you have requests for additional community data sets to be added to the archive.